Alright, first off, the obvious one. You can tweak the brightness right in the game’s settings. Just fire up CS2, hit up the settings menu, and go to the video section. But hey, here’s the catch – you gotta be in fullscreen mode to mess with the brightness slider.
If you’re not, you won’t even see it. So make sure you’re in fullscreen first. Then you’ll see this slider thing where you can adjust from 40% (pretty dark) to 140% (super bright). Just slide it around till it feels right for your eyes.
Console Commands
Okay, but what if you’re like, “Nah, that slider doesn’t do enough for me”? Well, there’s a more badass way. Dive into the console commands. It’s like the secret menu of CS2. Hit the “~” key to open the console. Now, the magic command here is r_fullscreen_gamma. You type that in, add a number,. You can change the brightness way more than the slider lets you.
The numbers go like this – 0 is full-on whiteout and the higher you go, the darker it gets. I’ve found something between 1.8 and 3.5 usually does the trick. It makes the game look way better, especially if the default settings are still too bright for you.
Other Tricks for NVIDIA
Go to the NVIDIA Control Panel. There’s this thing called ‘Adjust Desktop Color Settings’. In there, you’ll find an option called ‘Override to reference mode’. Turn that on. It kinda evens out the brightness in CS2, even if you’ve got the in-game slider cranked up to the max. Makes the game look smoother and less harsh on your eyes.
But hey, if you’re not on NVIDIA, no biggie. That console command I mentioned earlier, r_fullscreen_gamma, works no matter what card you’ve got. Just pop that in with a value of like 3 or higher and you’ll notice the brightness dialing back.